White broom
Cytisus multiflorus
Family · Fabaceae · Poisonous
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This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
Emergency
The broom that paints whole slopes of the northern and central interior white in April, so densely flowered that the plant disappears beneath them. It is an Iberian endemic.
Scrubland · Uplands · Roadsides and waste ground · Oak woods
Also known asPortuguese broom, white spanish broom
How to tell it
A shrub one to three metres, with many slender green grooved branches. Minute leaves, the lower ones with three leaflets and the upper simple, shed early. Small white flowers, a centimetre across, in groups of two or three all along the branch, so packed they cover the shrub. Black hairy pods.
What it is confused with
Common broom
Cytisus scoparius
Flower colour decides in a second: white on this, bright yellow on common broom. And common broom's stems have five sharp ridges, this one's are finer and more numerous. Both are toxic.
What it is for
It gave brooms and firewood, and it is a festival plant: flowering branches decorate the streets at May festivals in Trás-os-Montes. It is not eaten or infused. Like other brooms it contains alkaloids that alter heart rhythm.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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